Photos: Urumqi Riots

[wikipedia] The July 2009 Urumqi riots broke out on July 5th 2009, in Urumqi the capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in northwestern China.

The violence was part of an ongoing ethnic conflict between Han Chinese and Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic group that is predominantly Muslim and is one of the officially recognized ethnic groups in China. These specific riots were sparked by dissatisfaction with the Chinese central government’s handling of the deaths of two Uyghur workers in Guangdong province ten days previously.